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It's the same as a macro in most languages. It's just a way of defining an operation that is used repetitively throughout a program.

2. what is an "unsigned" type variable in C++?

It's to do with how values are stored at the binary level. Unsigned means that the number is stored in ordinary binary format. Signed values use the highest bit to show the sign of the number. Obviously signed 1000 0001 will not have the same value as unsigned 1000 0001.

3. this one may seem even stupider, but in 3 C++ books I have yet to discover how: how do you store data from one program session for use in a later session?

Write the data to a file and read it back from the file when you need it again.

They pretty much summed up #1 and #2 for you. #3, besides writing to a file, is OS dependent. For instance, in *nix, you can use a "pipe" to send the output of one program to be the input of another program. Works great. If you need it in Windows, it's a lottle more complicated, but doable if you know what you're doing... Once you have some more programming under your belt and become familiar with developing in whichever environment you plan to continue in, let me know and I can help you pipe the output to the ininput of another program.